


Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Her Story

by Sanctuaria



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief, Natasha didn't get a funeral, Not Captain America Friendly, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), and I'm still pissed about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:20:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23522962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanctuaria/pseuds/Sanctuaria
Summary: Steve Rogers got a lifetime with the woman he loved.Tony Stark got a funeral (two, actually). And murals. And graffiti art.Natasha got half an hour of mourning and a bench tossed in a lake.Once he has gotten far enough through the grieving process to be coherent again, Clint thinks maybe he should take issue with that.A.K.A. Even after two years, the author is still angry with the Russo Brothers, and would like to register a(nother) complaint.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton/Laura Barton
Comments: 9
Kudos: 47





	Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Her Story

When Clint arrives back from Vormir, he arrives back broken. He went to that beautiful, horrific planet of snow and ice and death as a shell of a person, and he comes back as half of one. His partner is gone, and some of him with her.

But of course, beyond a few moments staring at a lake, there’s no time for that. Bruce wields the Stone she died for, Clint’s phone rings for the first time in five years, and Thanos attacks, and then it is just nocking and shooting and ducking and weaving and, more often than not, running for his life, the Gauntlet and Natasha’s entire legacy tucked under one arm.

The battle ends, Tony dies, and Clint goes home. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right? He walks in the door, kisses the wife he never thought he’d see again, hugs the kids he was sure were lost to him forever… Except they’re here, in his arms, because of Natasha.

Everything he has—everything he is—is because of Nat.

Laura holds him at night when he cries, and they both hold Cooper, Lila, and little Nate when they wake up with nightmares about her being gone. He was as vague as he could have been about her death, but the Farmhouse isn’t the same without her in it. The “spare” upstairs room that hasn’t been spare for fifteen years, the extra toothbrush at the sink that no one can throw out, the drawers of clothes that Clint could just drown in, chasing her scent just one more time, a little piece of her to have and to hold that is fast fading away.

Then there are the funerals. Tony has two—one at the lakehouse for those who knew him personally, and one in New York for everyone else. They attend the lakehouse one, and with every unSnapped person who walks by Clint thinks, _She saved you too._ He and Wanda talk, afterwards, but it’s short and stilted and filled with things neither of them can bear talking about for long, so in the end they just hug and go their separate ways.

Clint doesn’t go to the one in New York. He hears about it on the news though, how the crowd filled Times Square and spilled out into the streets beyond. They’re reporting about a hundred thousand officially in attendance, packed tighter than New Year’s Eve, and three million more in the surrounding streets, with unofficial memorials held in metropolises all over the globe.By a week later, Clint can’t walk down a city street without seeing the face of the Iron Man suit graffitied on the wall of a building. He doesn’t begrudge him that—Tony Stark was a name known the world over, the weapons manufacturer who stopped making weapons but became one himself. The hero of New York, now twice over.

Natasha doesn’t get a funeral; that’s what he begrudges. By the time he realizes that no one has planned one, the Avengers are scattered to the wind—Thor accompanying the Guardians aboard the Milano, Carol back off who-knows-where in the galaxy, Scott and Hope to San Francisco, Bruce to his lab to further assess any lasting aftereffects of using the Guantlet, T’Challa and the others home to Wakanda, Peter Parker to high school in Queens, Strange to the Sanctum, and Wanda burying her own grief in Sokovia as part of the rebuilding effort there. Because there is _so much_ rebuilding to do, now that everyone is back—all of a sudden, there is not enough housing, not enough jobs, not enough vehicles, not enough food. It’s almost as destabilizing as the Snap in the first place. With all that going on, maybe Clint was the one who was supposed to pull it all together for Nat, if he wanted more for her than a stone bench thrown in a lake. Maybe he was the one who was supposed to call them back, bring them together, toast to her memory one last time.

Except he didn’t. He failed her, again. Just like he failed her after the Snap. Just like he failed her on Vormir. With each day that passes, that possibility slips further and further out of reach, and its all he can do to feed the chickens or correct Lila’s shooting posture or throw a ball for Nate to catch before he breaks down and has to escape somewhere still and silent.

Wallowing in grief as he is, he doesn’t hear about Steve’s leaving to return the Stones until it’s too late. He’s already gone, Clint’s intention of asking him to bring her body back along with it, but some small part of him still hopes that he’ll do it anyway, without Clint having to ask. This is Steve, after all—Captain America, the guy who looks out for everyone else before himself. And this is Natasha, the one who switched sides for him, the one who followed him out of hard-won legitimacy back into the cold she never should have had to brave again because he needed her there beside him. But Steve doesn’t come back with her body, doesn’t come back at all except as an old man with stories of dances and a shield to pass on before he disappears again.

The media thinks he’s dead, too. Time travel is classified, and the news cycle hates complications. It doesn’t matter how the Soul Stone was gotten or what the cost was, just like it doesn’t matter who wielded the Stones and didn’t die doing it. Even Steve Rogers, who fucked off to alter the course of history for the sake of his own happy ending, whose last real self-sacrificial act was seventy-eight years ago, is mourned more than she is.

And it makes sense. Rationally, _intellectually_ , he knows that. All the world knows of Natasha Romanoff is a side-note, the lone female Avenger who was insignificant next to gods and men made of metal. The most prominent image they have of her is her standing amongst the wreckage of an agency since declared a terrorist organization and flipping the bird to Congress over it even as the details of her darkest acts was published to the internet for all to see. And, if not that, then Natasha Romanoff as the slippery, double-crossing turncoat some always feared she’d be, turning on the Accords she’d signed and becoming a fugitive. The shadows are where she had always operated, preferred to operate. She couldn’t have cared less about the glory, or the recognition, but Clint—

Clint cares.

Clint cares because he can’t let the world forget her the way _he_ forgot her after the Snap. He cares because he alone knows how much she has done for them, not just in her final act but in her years at his side, with S.H.I.E.L.D. He cares because he can’t forget what he’s lost, what Laura and Cooper and Lila and Nate have lost.

Tony Stark is mourned because of the daughter, the family he left behind.

Most of the world thinks Natasha didn’t have one. A good person to sacrifice, if sacrifices have to be made. Someone no one will miss.

The worst part, the part that keeps him up at night the most, is that that was her line of thinking too.

Should he have tried better to show her how lost he would be without her?

Would it have made a difference?

So Clint goes on the warpath. He’s not rich—comfortable, perhaps, but not rich enough for what he has in mind. He goes to Pepper, first—visits with Morgan and sits down with her for tea. She is pale and wan but still full of life when she looks at her daughter, the way Clint himself is sustained only by his own three kids. Her voice, however, is resolute when she tells him that, yes, of course she’ll help him. Then he is off to Wakanda, securing the same promise of King T’Challa, and then he is all over the world, speaking with prime ministers and parliaments and presidents. He visits every country Natasha has ever helped, whether they knew it or not, and impresses upon them her importance, her goodness, because even if she never knew it herself _they_ will know it now. When Laura calls to tell him the kids miss him, he does not go home to stay but rather starts taking them with him, one at a time, and watches as they blossom from the experience.

Cooper, with Natasha’s level-headedness, speaking to men and women in power succinctly and clearly and leaving no room for argument.

Lila, with Natasha’s fire and spunk, saying to world leaders what others wouldn’t dare and yet maintaining a politeness that is beyond reproach, leaving them chasing their own tails.

Nate, with Natasha’s empathy, and his ability to make them understand their drive more than even Clint can, haggard and desperate as he is.

At first, he is humored. Then, the winds begin to change.

With Pepper’s help, he sets up the Natasha Romanoff New Beginnings Scholarship, partially or fully funding the college tuition of victims of human trafficking. With T’Challa’s, the Second Start Fund, doing the same for kids serving in juvenile detention—kids who made mistakes the world doesn’t really think they can come back from. When Daisy Johnson’s S.H.I.E.L.D. comes out into the open once again and the Academies are rebuilt under the stern direction of Melinda May, he gets a building named after her—one not in operations but communications, a building where cadets learn to make the hard calls, to show mercy, and to make sacrifices. And he makes sure her name is inscribed on the wall of valor with the likes of Phil Coulson and Victoria Hand to be seen and remembered for the best things she ever did, instead of the worst as he knew she remembered herself.

Though Natasha Romanoff may be gone—and part of his heart, _their_ _family’s_ hearts with her—those she saved through S.H.I.E.L.D. or the Avengers or her final sacrifice are not. Those that will be saved in her name in the future are not. And as her partner, Clint Barton’s last mission on this Earth will be to tell her story.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you thought, or if you would like to scream about the Russos with me.


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